Nvidia’s flagship conference kicked off on Monday morning in San Jose, with CEO Jensen Huang making a two-hour-long case for his company’s continued dominance in front of a packed SAP Center crowd. Part of that pitch: a whole new form of compensation for the industry’s software engineers.
Huang’s bets on supercomputing have made Nvidia the world’s most valuable company, with billions of dollars of investment in artificial intelligence tools now flowing into the Santa Clara giant’s coffers. The March conference is a chance for Nvidia to show off how it’s improved those supercomputers and tout its work with partners across industries. But Huang also used his keynote to suggest that companies court tech workers with the very currency his hardware mints by the trillion — tokens.
Tokens are the individual pieces of data that AI models are trained on and that let AI models perform thought-like behavior. Message ChatGPT with “Send unbelievable facts,” and it will break the statement into tokens — “Send,” “un,” “believe,” “able” and “facts” — to then form a response. In more complex cases, an AI model might churn through tens of thousands of tokens while reasoning through a request or creating a new tool…